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Kennys since 1940

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Gertrude Degenhardt

Gertrude Degenhardt

The Kenny Gallery is enormously excited to see the return of renowned German artist Gertrude Degenhardt with a collection of paintings and graphics here from 11th February, 2023.

Entitled Flying Melodies, the show has new and retrospective works and is a sort of Greatest Hits - many images which will be well known to Irish fans of the artist. The exhibition will be officially opened by music legend Frankie Gavin at 3:00pm on Saturday 11th February at Kenny's Liosbán Gallery in Galway.

Degenhardt is one of Germany's leading painters and illustrators. She first came to Ireland in the early nineteen seventies, when she was commissioned to prepare some illustrations for a German edition of a book of short stories by Liam O'Flaherty. She fell in love with the West of Ireland and has been coming here ever since.

Gertrude is a keen observer of people. She renders characters with a sense of absurdity, sometimes revealing and harnessing the grotesque, but most often with joyful humanity. She ultimately shows our human folly while reminding us of one of our few redeeming forces - music. Song and wine are frequent features of her work, as are revolution, vagabonds, dance, musicians, tramps, Ireland, and, again and again, Martin Degenhardt, her late husband.

Among her themes are the enjoyment of life, hate, desire, admiration, bliss, disdain, greed, and suffering. Her ink, pencil lines, or graphic motifs sing, and her gouache or tempera application is always distinctive, purposeful, direct, lyrical and above all, beautiful.

She has presented a number of exhibitions at Kennys over the years, but it is high time for this one - welcome back to Galway 'Trude'!

The exhibition opens daily 9:00-17:00, Monday to Saturday and runs until 16th March 2023.

Find artworks by Gertrude Degenhardt >

Find more works on the artist's German website >